Evernote and Skitch – Hey You Got Perfect in My Awesome!

Two of my favorite applications that I use on my desktop, laptop, iPad, and iPod Touch are now together. It reminds me of the old commercials where the person is eating chocolate and bumps into the person eating peanut butter. While at first upset, they realize it is a perfect match and the rest they say is confectionary history.

Skitch has been used at our school for the last 3 years and quickly became the most used piece of software next to a browser. In fact, it became a verb in my teaching as we skitch anything we need to add to documents, VoiceThreads, Portfolios, or to create a great desktop picture. It is the Swiss Army Knife of software tools. I have paid for others and know how to take a screenshot, but Skitch remained my go to tool. While the use of expiring betas did make it a source of frustration since each time the version expired, I had to blast out an update, the sheer power of what could be done with the software out weighed the 10 to 15 minute task of blasting out the latest version. When they announced Skitch Plus last year, I contacted them as I wanted to buy it for our school. Sorry, Keith said but they are working on an educational solution, but it is not ready. He then gave me a 5 year license to Skitch Plus for our school!

Evernote has become an integral part of my productivity and as I get older, the best way to remember what is so easily forgotten by my brain. As our school gets ready to pilot test iPads, I believe we need to put Evernote into the workflow for students and teachers since it will increase the efficiency of every member of the team. With the new groups and sponsored accounts, it is practical and economical to test out a new way of document workflow even within our existing systems of Moodle, Google Apps for Education, and FirstClass.